Ostend earned its nickname in the nineteenth century, when Leopold I and Leopold II decided that this fishing village on the easternmost edge of an old island called Testerep was where the royal family should summer. The Belgian aristocracy followed, and the dunes between sea and town filled with villas, casinos, racing tracks, and the long arc of the Royal Galleries - a covered promenade Leopold II built so his sister could walk to the beach in any weather. Today you can still trace the Belle Epoque footprint along the seafront: the Hippodrome Wellington thoroughbreds still race in summer, the Casino still glitters at night, and the wide fine-sand beaches still split into two unwritten zones - the Klein Strand near the pier where the day-trippers pile in, and the Groot Strand where the locals stretch out.

The painter James Ensor was born in Ostend in 1860, lived above his mother's souvenir and seashell shop, and almost never left. From his small house on the Vlaanderenstraat - now a museum - he painted the people of the seaside town as carnival grotesques: parading skeletons, leering masks, Christ entering Brussels surrounded by a mob of harlequins. He saw the resort beneath the surface, the way wind off the North Sea could turn a postcard scene into something hallucinatory. His work scandalised the salons of Brussels for decades before the world caught up. The Mu.Zee, Ostend's modern art museum, hangs Ensor alongside fellow coast painters Leon Spilliaert and Constant Permeke - three local boys who taught Belgium how to look at itself.

Four hundred and seven Allied bombs fell on Ostend during the Second World War - more than on any other Belgian city. The Germans had grabbed it without a fight on 15 October 1914 and turned the harbour into a U-boat base; the British answered with the disastrous Ostend Raids of April and May 1918. Twenty-two years later, the Luftwaffe pounded the seafront for a week in May 1940, destroying the city hall, the city archive, and a stack of Ensor and Spilliaert paintings that had been stored there. Then the Royal Air Force took its turn, terrified that Hitler would launch the invasion of England from this coastline. By the time Canadian troops liberated the city on 8 September 1944, much of the Belle Epoque was rubble. The post-war rebuild traded most of the surviving Edwardian villas for modernist apartment blocks - which is why Ostend today reads as a strange palimpsest of old grandeur and concrete optimism.

By 1981 Marvin Gaye was broke, hounded by the IRS, and addicted to cocaine. A Belgian concert promoter named Freddy Cousaert offered him a room above a music bar in Ostend, and Gaye accepted. He spent his Ostend months running on the seawall, lifting weights with local kids, performing one quiet concert at the Casino-Kursaal, and writing the album that would become Midnight Love. "Sexual Healing," recorded in nearby Ohain but written here, hit number one in late 1982 and won him his first Grammys. He left Ostend the same year, returned to America, and was shot dead by his father in Los Angeles in April 1984. The bench he sat on, the dike he ran along, and a small statue on the seafront are all you need to find the place. Belgians treat the story with the unsentimental affection they reserve for people who showed up needing help and stayed long enough to be missed.

Ostend in winter is one of the great underrated experiences in northern Europe. The Coast Tram - the world's longest tram line, running 67 kilometres along the Belgian shore - rattles in from De Panne and Knokke. The Christmas market, one of Europe's largest, fills the central streets through December and draws six hundred thousand people. The Mercator, a three-masted training barque retired from the Belgian merchant marine, sits in the inner harbour as a museum ship. At the old fortified Atlantic Wall site in Raversijde, you can walk the German bunkers that defended this coast against the invasion that never came. The North Sea wind never stops. The light is northern, silver, the kind that taught Spilliaert to paint loneliness.